Tracking militarists’ efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy

Michael Hayden

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Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), is a frequent media pundit on national security matters and a principal at the Chertoff Group, a business consultancy established by former director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.[1]

During his tenure in government, Hayden presided over several controversial government programs, including the warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens’ phone calls[2] and the use of armed drones overseas.[3] Since leaving government, Hayden has remained a vocal advocate of these policies, often appearing on Fox News and in other media outlets. For instance, he has continued to insist that the wiretapping program was “effective, appropriate, and lawful”[4] even though a federal judge ruled that the program likely violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).[5]

Hayden has also repeatedly defended Bush-era policies concerning “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including torture methods like waterboarding. While still at the CIA, Hayden confirmed that the agency had waterboarded detainees hundreds of times, citing “the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable.”[6]

After the assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces in Pakistan, contended that “Information derived from enhanced interrogation techniques helped lead us to bin Laden,” even likening skeptics of the claim to 9/11 conspiracy theorists.[7] However, subsequent reports revealed that key intelligence leading up to the bin Laden raid was secured from detainees who were never tortured, and moreover that detainees who were tortured often provided false information that may have only prolonged the search for bin Laden.

Despite his close association with the Republican Party, Hayden has been a vocal opponent of Donald Trump. In an 2016 interview on MSNBC, Hayden said that if elected president Trump could spur a crisis in “civilian military control,” suggesting that military leaders may not “defer” to his decision-making. He added: “When you’re the head of a global superpower, inconsistency, unpredictability, those are dangerous things. They frighten your friends and they tempt your enemies. And so I would be very, very concerned.” He was one of several dozen former Republican “national security officials” who signed an open letter claiming that they would not vote for Trump.

Since Trump’s election, Hayden has remained a vocal critic, repeatedly excoriating the president for his handling of controversies concerning Russian interference in the election and ties to Trump’s advisers. In a May 2016 op-ed for the Washington Post, Hayden called Trump Russia’s “useful tool.” He explained that a in Russian that’s a “term from the Soviet era describing the naive individual whom the Kremlin usually held in contempt but who could be induced to do things on its behalf.”

Reaction to 2014 Senate Report on CIA Torture

In early 2014, shortly after Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for the public release of a Senate-approved report critical of the CIA torture program, Hayden claimed on Fox News that the senator was showing ”deep emotional feeling” but not objectivity. The comment spurred intense criticism from Feinstein’s Democratic colleagues, including Sen. Tom Udall, who called Hayden’s charge “baseless” and “sexist.” Said Sen. Ron Wyden: “Over the past five years I watched Chairman Feinstein manage this investigation in an extremely thorough and professional manner, and the result is an extraordinarily detailed report based on millions of pages of internal CIA records, including operational cables, internal memos, and interview transcripts.”[8] Hayden’s comment elicited criticism even from some conservative commentators. Fox’s Chris Wallace, who interviewed Hayden, responded incredulously, asking the former CIA chief, “Forgive me because you and I both know Senator Feinstein. I have the highest regard for her. You’re saying you think she was emotional in these conclusions?”[9]

After a largely redacted version of the Senate torture report was released in December 2014, Hayden lambasted it as “analytically offensive” and “almost street-like” in its “simplistic language and conclusions.” In the wake of the report’s release, Sen. Feinstein stated in a speech that Hayden had misrepresented the CIA interrogation program by describing it in previous Senate testimony as “minimally harmful and applied in highly clinical and professional manner.”[10]

Hayden said in response that he had simply repeated what he read in CIA records after studying them for a few hours. “My testimony is consistent with what I was told and what I had read in CIA records,” he quipped during an interview with POLITICO. “I said what the agency told me, but I didn’t just accept it at face value. I did what research I could on my own, but I had a 10-day window in which to look at this thing [the committee’s request for information]. I was actually in Virginia for about 30 hours and studied the program for about three before I went up to testify.”[11]

In September 2015, Hayden along with fellow former CIA leaders George Tenet, Porter Goss, Jose Rodriguez and other CIA veterans and lawyers, released a book, Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program. One journalist said of the book: “While many of the former spy leaders admit the torture program was controversial, all defend the use and legality of the harsh techniques, which included waterboarding and rectal feeding.”[12]

CIA torture program whistleblower John Kiriakou opined of Rebuttal: “I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.”[13]

Sen. Feinstein also stated at the time that the book “doesn’t lay a glove on the factual accuracy of the Committee’s report.”[14] She added: “The essays do not contradict the SSCI’s main conclusions: that these interrogation techniques were brutal and did not produce information that was not already obtained in more traditional and acceptable ways by intelligence and law enforcement personnel.”[15]

Support for Expansive NSA Surveillance

Following revelations in Spring 2013 that the National Security Agency was gathering large quantities of “metadata” about the private communications of American citizens, Hayden claimed that the program was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks and defended the administration’s purported transparency. He also praised the Barack Obama administration’s oversight of the agency. “Frankly, the Obama administration was more transparent about this effort than we were in the Bush administration,” Hayden told CNN. “They made this metadata collection activity available to all the members of Congress. Not just all the members of the intelligence committees.”[16]

In a separate interview, Hayden praised the Obama administration’s approach to surveillance for its “incredible continuity” with the Bush administration. “We’ve had two very different presidents pretty much doing the same thing with regard to electronic surveillance. That seems to me to suggest that these things do work,” he said. In fact, Hayden added, Obama had actually expanded the program. Under a 2008 FISA expansion supported by then-Sen. Obama, Hayden said, “NSA is actually empowered to do more things than I was empowered to do under President Bush’s special authorization.”[17]

One former NSA analyst, Kirk Wiebe, criticized Hayden and other surveillance advocates for inverting the constitutional standard that suspects are innocent until proven guilty. “Michael Hayden and others have recast the Fourth Amendment from one that is based on probable cause in presenting evidence for subsequent invasion of privacy to one of reasonable suspicion,” Wiebe told NPR. “We have not had the public discussion or agreement by the American people to define what that means and what the ramifications of that are in terms of the government’s ability to view into our private lives.”[18]

In a January 2015 speech, Hayden opined that his standards for what he thought was appropriate for the NSA to do in terms of surveillance changed after the 9/11 attacks. “I actually started to do different things,” he proclaimed. “And I didn’t need to ask ‘mother, may I’ from the Congress or the president or anyone else.”[19]

Quipped one observer in response: “The more innocent people that terrorists succeed in murdering, the less our own government is limited by the Constitution. With every attack that the government fails to prevent it gains new powers.”[20]

Hayden has also derided NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and brushed aside any suggestions that he may be allowed to return to the United States, saying in October 2015 that Snowden will “die in Moscow.”[21] He has also alluded that Snowden may be a “foreign agent,” saying that he has his “suspicions” but “no evidence.”[22]

In a June 2015 speech, Hayden also expressed satisfaction with the small and largely insignificant reforms the NSA had to undertake after the Snowden revelations. “If somebody would come up to me and say ‘Look, Hayden, here’s the thing: This Snowden thing is going to be a nightmare for you guys for about two years. And when we get all done with it, what you’re going to be required to do is that little 215 program about American telephony metadata—and by the way, you can still have access to it, but you got to go to the court and get access to it from the companies, rather than keep it to yourself’—I go: ‘And this is it after two years? Cool!’”[23]

Middle East Hawk

Hayden pushed a hardline “pro-Israel” position during the Iranian nuclear negotiations and denounced the agreement reached between Iran and six world powers in July 2015. He supported Israeli Prime Minister’s controversial address to Congress in March 2015 criticizing the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran, writing at the time: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seeing the handwriting on the wall as clearly as Babylonian King Belshazzar in the Book of Daniel, has hurried to Washington to make an eleventh-hour appeal to Congress. (Belshazzar was killed and his capital sacked by the Persians the very night of Daniel’s prophecy). Netanyahu’s haste is understandable. The draft agreement represents what has fairly been described as massive and irreversible concessions to Iran.”[24]

After the deal was reached, Hayden declared that “a standing congressional authorization for the use of military force should Iran seriously violate the agreement seems a no-brainer.” He further stated that the “cost” of the deal “must be making the DOD budget healthy” and also called for “more arms for our Arab friends and for Israel.” For Israel, he stated: “I would include (as former administration adviser Dennis Ross suggests) a promise of the ‘MOP,’ the 30,000-pound bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrator capable of destroying the hardened Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow.”[25]

After the November 2015 ISIS terrorist attacks in Paris, Hayden stated that the fight against ISIS in Syria was “under-resourced and over-regulated” and stressed the need to “commit more to the fight” and “loosen our rules of engagement.”[26]

Republican Partisan

During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Hayden opined in regards to the understanding that GOP candidate Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, has of foreign policy: “His instincts are alright.”[27]

Hayden served as a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. He drew attention in January 2012 when, in contrast to Romney’s more hawkish bluster on Iran, he cautioned against a U.S. strike on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons facilities. According to The New York Times’ “Caucus” blog, Hayden “told analysts and reporters in Washington … that a military strike would provoke Iran to move even more rapidly toward developing a nuclear weapon, and would drive the program underground.” After the Times noted that Romney had “said repeatedly that he would consider military action to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Hayden clarified that “he advises Mr. Romney on intelligence matters, not on Iran.”[28]

Hayden later joined his voice to a chorus of conservative commentators who questioned the timing of the release of information about the Gen. David Petraeus sex scandal, which broke in November 2012. Hayden called the timing “mysterious,” echoing other pundits who were concerned that the scandal could impede the investigation into the Benghazi, Libya attacks.[29]

In addition to his other private-sector work, Hayden has served on the advisory board of Lignet.com (the Langley Intelligence Group Network), an online news service that is part of the conservative Newsmax Media group. Lignet claims to provide “global intelligence and forecasting from former CIA, U.S. intelligence, and national security officers, drawing on an international network of experts and sources.” Advisors to Lignet have included several other high-profile right-wing figures, including John Bolton and former Ambassador Otto Reich. Fred Fleitz, a controversial former CIA analyst and State Department official, has served as the managing editor of Lignet.[30]

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